So, the universe just winked. Now what?

The first episode of the sci-fi mystery 3 Body Problem — created by Game of Thrones’ David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and True Blood writer Alexander Woo — introduced us to the brainy Oxford Five, a cunning Chinese scientist, and an otherworldly phenomenon in which all the stars in the sky inexplicably flickered. 

“Between climate change and the pandemic, we’ve gotten a glimpse into how people in the world react differently to a global threat,” Weiss told Netflix. “We see a similar spectrum of reactions in 3 Body Problem.”

As the laws of nature unravel before their eyes, the close-knit group of brilliant scientists realize there may be something sinister behind it all. “All sorts of strange things have been happening,” says Benioff. “Scientists have been killing themselves in unusual ways. Scientific experiments have been failing for unknown reasons.”

Episode 2, “Red Coast” — directed by Derek Tsang — throws viewers into the past, the present, and an entirely virtual world. And a lot happens: Nanotech genius Auggie (Eiza González) shuts things down at her job. Gifted physicist Jin (Jess Hong) becomes a gamer. Teacher Will (Alex Sharp) gets some bad news. Snack impresario Jack (John Bradley) punches a philosopher. Meanwhile, in ’60s China, scientist Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng) makes a long-distance phone call. And that’s all before we get to some extreme rehydrating action. 

Let’s catch up, shall we?

Learn more about costuming in the VR World.

So, why did the stars blink? 

The episode begins as the world totally freaks over the star-blipping moment that occurred at the end of Episode 1. But not everyone is buying it. Stoner physicist Saul (Jovan Adepo) tells Ye Wenjie (Rosalind Chao) that he thinks “it’s bullshit… It never happened,” he says. “Everyone on Earth [saw it].… None of the satellites saw it.… It was a deepfake.” Ye seems unimpressed by his theory. After all, she’s been through situations much more intense than some funky twinkles.   

What was Ye really doing at Red Coast Base?

Back in 1968 in Inner Mongolia, Red Coast Base sends a message out into the universe, addressed to “inhabitants of another world”: “We hope to establish contact with other civilized societies. We look forward to working with you to build a better life in this vast universe.” They’ve been transmitting the invitation for a few years but haven’t heard anything back. Ye says that it’s the Fermi paradox. Los Alamos A-bomb scientist Enrico Fermi once speculated that life has to be somewhere in those zillion stars, but where is everybody? Realizing the signal is too weak, Ye comes up with a plan to amplify the message.

Ye says that if they blast the message into the sun, it will push their communication way into the universe. It’s similar to a real phenomenon scientists call gravitational lensing, which suggests Ye learned Einstein’s relativity theory, even if her father’s teaching it led to his death. Ye’s colleague Comrade Yang (Yu Guming) loves the theory so much he passes off her research as his own to their supervisor, Commissar Lei (Deng Qiaozhi). 

Ed Miller

Why does Yang steal Ye’s work ? 

Yang’s just another man in a long line of insecure jerks who double-crossed Ye. When Yang shares the stolen theory with their boss, he’s quickly dismissed because there can only be one “Red Sun in the heart of the People”: Chairman Mao. 

“As a Chinese native, I grew up hearing stories about people who went through the Cultural Revolution, and it’s always been a fascinating part of our history,” Tsang told Netflix. “There are just so many [stories from that time] that deserve to be told. I found as many books and films about the Cultural Revolution as I could, but I think what helped me the most was talking to people who actually lived through it.” 

Ye doesn’t give up. When her colleagues aren’t looking, she aims the telescope at the sun during the next transmission. The message zooms into the sun and out into the deep universe. Her subtle action will have massive consequences for all humankind. 

Why did Ye send the transmission without authorization? 

“[We’ve seen] her disdain [for] authority because she saw where it leads; it led to her father being beaten to death in front of 50,000 people by schoolgirls with their belts,” says Weiss. “She chooses science and she chooses reality, and she chooses the hope that maybe somewhere else out there, there’s somebody better than what the world has offered up to her thus far in her life.”

What’s going on with Auggie and the countdown?

Meanwhile back in the present, Auggie arrives very frazzled for the first test of the super-sharp nanofibers her company’s been working for seven years to develop. As her colleagues joyously watch her product cut up a synthetic diamond cube, Auggie’s countdown flashes before her eyes, just minutes away from zero. Instead of celebrating, she shuts down the project and runs outside. Suddenly — with about a minute and a half to go — her countdown stops. Seems like the stranger from Episode 1 was speaking the truth when she told Auggie that stopping her work would end the countdown. 

Ed Miller

How does Auggie meet Da Shi?

Clarence “Da” Shi (Benedict Wong) is waiting for her outside the lab. He thinks they can help each other, so they go to Thomas Wade’s (Liam Cunningham) shadowy intelligence operation headquarters, the Black Palace, by the River Thames in London. Da Shi shows Auggie CCTV footage of her smoking alone on a stairway. Somehow the stranger who lit her cigarette and delivered the ominous warning has been scrubbed from the footage. 

Da Shi tells Auggie that the mysterious man who showed up at Vera Ye’s (Vedette Lim) funeral was Mike Evans (Jonathan Pryce), who owns the world’s largest privately held oil company. Later we learn more: Evans has been funding anti-science causes around the world. But how did he know Vera and Ye Wenjie? 

What’s the deal with Mike Evans?

Back in the ’70s, a younger Mike Evans (Ben Schnetzer) was a tree-plantin’ nature boy. When Ye shows up at a logging site in Inner Mongolia, she’s surprised to see seedlings sprouting up where tree stumps used to be, and she’s even more shocked to discover Evans living in a hut and generally looking like a romance-novel hunk. 

Mike tells Ye he’s not there to save the local community; he’s planting trees so an endangered bird — a subspecies of the northwestern brown swallow — can have its habitat back. Ye sees a copy of Rachel Carson’s ’60s environmental manifesto Silent Spring in his ramshackle home, and she becomes intrigued. 

“They’re very few really genuinely selfish characters [in the show]. Even someone as loopy as Evans seems to be doing this for something greater, something bigger than than specifically himself,” says Woo. 

Ye later recites a passage — essentially an environmentalist pickup line — to him: “In nature, nothing exists alone.” Woo explains: “[The passage] is obviously very meaningful for Ye, and a theme going throughout the series [is] people finding a community that is not their biological family.” 

Speaking of family, what’s going on with the rest of the Oxford Five?

Things aren’t looking great for Will. After missing multiple calls from his doctor, he’s finally given the news that he has pancreatic cancer. Sharp, who plays Will, says that facing his mortality means his character’s “mode of operating… completely changes.”

Ed Miller

What’s going on in the VR world?

Jin takes another spin on the VR headset, which drops her into a snow-covered landscape, where she meets the Count of the West (Tom Wu) and his aptly named follower, Follower (Eve Ridley). 

“There’s an addictive quality to the experience for [Jin]” says Weiss. “[It’s] an experience no one on Earth has ever had before… and suddenly she has it at will, sitting there by her bedside table.”

Meanwhile — having tried on Jin’s VR headset and found himself swiftly (and virtually) beheaded for not being “invited” to play — Jack gets his own chance at the game when a brand-new VR headset mysteriously shows up in his tech-bro home, next to his totally sick drum kit. Jack’s game takes place in Tudor England, and he punches his guide, Renaissance humanist thinker Sir Thomas More, in the face.  

“It felt brilliant to punch Sir Thomas More in the face,” Bradley told Netflix. “I should do more of it. I’m worried I’m getting a taste for it.”

Ed Miller

What is the goal of the VR game?

Jin gives herself the name Copernicus (the Renaissance astronomer who put forth the theory that planets revolve around the sun), and the count explains her mission: Solve the riddle of Civilization 137. “Except for stable eras, all times are chaotic eras,” he says. In a bid to save his people, the emperor has been consulting great minds to predict movements of the sun in order to determine whether an era will be stable or chaotic. If he’s wrong, an entire civilization will be destroyed. 

Wait, what’s a chaotic era? And how does anyone survive one?

Like the name suggests, chaotic eras are not a time to relax or flourish. Jin witnesses the blasting heat of a chaotic era while she hides in the shade with the Count of the West. A chaotic era is a time of unpredictability, where a civilization gets either too much or too little sun, which kills everyone. Follower walks onto the parched land, lies down, and deflates like an air mattress. The count explains that his people survive chaotic eras by dehydrating themselves and rehydrating in stable times. He rolls Follower up like a warm tortilla and gives her to Jin. “The Count of the West [has] a line repeated throughout: ‘If one of us survives, we all survive,’ ” says Woo. “To me, it’s kind of like the flip side of the coin of the quote from Silent Spring.”

They walk to a huge pyramid, where the count offers Emperor Zhou (Russell Yuen) a code for the universe based on his studies of the ancient Chinese divination text, the I Ching. The count then offers the emperor a code for the universe that will help predict the length of stable and chaotic eras. 

“This is prophesy, not prediction… this is the I Ching, it’s beautiful, but it’s not scientific,” says a skeptical Jin. “I don’t think it will solve your problem — it’s divination, it doesn’t follow any physical laws…the laws of physics, everything we’ve observed to be true about the world.” Then the emperor retorts, “Which world?” — a reminder that there are worlds beyond her own. 

The count arranges some twigs into trigram patterns, almost like binary computer code, and with some hocus-pocus he predicts that a long stable era is upon them. The emperor gives the order: “Rehydrate the masses!”  

What does rehydration involve?  

Soldiers retrieve the burrito-rolled dehydrated bodies and hurl them into the sea. Within seconds the floppy people re-inflate. The nude dudes and gals emerge from the water and cavort on the land. Even Follower pops out of the water fully restored to her optimal cuteness and gives Jin a hug. “You didn’t abandon me,” she says. Phew. Everything is going to be OK, right?

Nope! Seconds later, everything goes wrong. Order descends into chaos as the sun suddenly disappears and a cold front turns the Edenic scene into an Arctic wasteland. The prediction was wrong and the chaotic era has returned sooner than expected. Jin battles her way through frozen bodies, trying to reach Follower, but she’s too late and watches the girl shatter before her eyes. The mysterious avatar (Sea Shimooka) then reappears and announces that Civilization 137 has been obliterated by extreme cold. But it’s not all bad news.

The avatar says that the level was a success because Jin established the superiority of science over mysticism. In Level 2, Jin must use science to save the next civilization. Guess that’s a win of sorts?

Has anyone responded to Ye’s message to the universe?

Have they ever. A message appears on Ye’s monitor. It’s from a pacifist from another world who tells her not to respond. "If you respond," the pacifist says, "we will come. Your world will be conquered."

So, does Ye push the button?

Oh, boy. Having had a run-in with her father’s unrepentant killer, Ye has already seen too much inhumanity for one lifetime. She types a reply to the otherworldly message: “Come. We cannot save ourselves. I will help you conquer this world.” 

“Derek did such an outrageously good job of just building tension and ratcheting up, tightening the screws over the course of the five or so minutes it takes her to make that decision,” Weiss says.

Her finger trembling, Ye presses the send button. 

“She was warned not to reply, and she did reply, believing there’s nothing else left that could save this world,” Zine Tseng, who plays younger Ye, says. 

“Everything she’s seen on a human level, on an environmental, global level, tells her that we are going to destroy ourselves,” says Weiss. “She sincerely believes that inviting someone else to take over [is] the best thing she can do, not just for herself, but for everybody.” But is it? We’ll find out as Season 1 continues. 

Keep watching 3 Body Problem on Netflix for more.